Ole Miss iced Arkansas’ kicker 3 times in a row, but he hit the game-winner anyway

Ole Miss and Arkansas will and always have played the stupidest football of the year. 2017’s contest featured a combined five turnovers between both teams, with the Rebels coughing up three. Arkansas won after this happened:

That this game annually comes down to the final play in regulation is more or less verified canon at this point. Ole Miss and Arkansas both currently play very stupid brands of college football, with Bret Bielema’s outfit rolling into Bill Connelley’s S&P+ rankings at no. 90 and interim head coach Matt Luke’s men standing at no. 76. According to Bill C., Ole Miss had a 62 percent chance of winning this game, which really means that Arkansas had a 38 percent chance of causing unsightly chaos, and that they certainly did.

Ole Miss held a 21-point advantage in the first half, but soon squandered it on fumbles, stalled offensive drives, and thin defense. That brought Arkansas back into the thick of things late, with Ole Miss holding a 37-35 lead on the strength of two Gary Wunderlich field goals late in the fourth quarter. Arkansas then executed a 12-play, four-minute drive down to Ole Miss’ 16 yard line — aided by an Ole Miss pass interference flag, then further backed up by an offensive holding call by the Hogs — and sat within happy field goal range with about seven seconds left on the clock.

That brought out Arkansas’ field goal unit. Ole Miss had three timeouts to use, and you better believe they used all three of them, because #CollegeKickers is certainly a real fail to follow around on fall Saturdays. Just ask Nick Saban and Alabama.

All off this preamble is to say that Ole Miss’ attempt at the triple ice of Arkansas’ field goal kicker didn’t work. The Rebels lost, 38-37, in yet another high-scoring and riotous and mistake-riddled affair that absolutely should attend the flagship institutions of the states of Arkansas and Mississippi.

On the year, Ole Miss is just the second team to attempt the triple ice for the win, with Houston successfully pulling it off as recently as last week. College football coaches can call timeouts whenever they want, but for the sake of flow and gamesmanship, it seems like the capability for the triple ice should be taken away and moved to the NFL’s system of just one stoppage during field goal attempts. The game’s slow enough as it is.